Adelaide’s Media Resource Centre is bringing together Australia’s filmmakers for the two-day New Screen Makers Conference, featuring guest speakers Dario Russo and David Ashby.
Filmmaking is a different beast to what it once was. With the introduction of online platforms like YouTube, displaying one’s work to a larger audience has become much easier. However, for serious filmmakers, there is a lot more work involved in getting noticed in amongst the now oversaturated sea of online content. In addition, there are a number of other factors to consider – funding, distribution, marketing, etc. – in order to develop a sustainable career in film.
The New Screen Makers Conference is a two-day conference created by Adelaide’s Media Resource Centre in order to assist newer filmmakers with getting a start in their career. The Media Recourse Centre will be providing opportunities to meet those more experienced in the field, including creators of the cult series 'Danger 5', Dario Russo and David Ashby.
Dario and David initially met in high school, with both interested in filmmaking and working on their own projects, but the two really connected when they realised they both shared a love of retro films, and a warped sense of humour. The two began collaborating on films which showcased their bizarre ideas, including a short film about a university student who has his brain replaced by a killer whale's. It was in 2007 when the duo first got the world’s attention with a short called ‘Italian Spiderman’.
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“[‘Italian Spiderman’] was made as part of my third year Flinders University screen production course, where we got to shoot something on a can of 16mm film,” Dario explains. “I had a YouTube channel with three of my short films on there already and gained absolutely no attention whatsoever. We just dumped the trailer on the same channel, and it just started gaining momentum. I remember the next day we had something like 1,800 views. By the end of the week, it had 6,000. That was already way more than anything else we’d released.”
The pair have no idea why their “weird little trailer” connected to so many people, but it did in a big way. Since going online, ‘Italian Spiderman’ has been viewed over six million times, even gaining fans in Jimmy Fallon and Stan Lee.
David believes it was their “lucky break, quite frankly. I remember when Dario finished it, we were going to the old school thing where you enter into the festival circuit, hopefully get some awards and exposure, and, if you do well enough, progress further. But, because of it going viral, we were able to skip that.”
Thanks to their embrace of newer media and technologies, Dario and David have gone on to continue creating, including the cult hit ‘Danger 5’ for SBS. The show, about a team of 1960s-style spies and their missions to thwart plots by Hitler, including stealing various national monuments, to creating a race of Nazi-dinosaur soldiers. Because of its success in Australia, a second series was commissioned, with both being available for streaming globally on Netflix. This path to success has become less unusual as time has passed, with many new filmmakers taking this model on board. The New Screen Makers Conference has been developed to show that there are many different paths to success, and Dario and David are more than happy to share what they’ve learned.
“It’s not like, ‘Hey! We know how to make viral videos!’ We don’t know what we’re doing! At the end of the day, there are an infinite number of pathways to getting involved in the film industry. The point of the conference is presenting a whole bunch of people with different experiences, so new filmmakers can get inside info on what some of the possibilities are, because everyone’s story is different.”
New Screen Makers Conference is held on 15-16 July at the Media Resource Centre's Mercury Cinema.
